[Suggetion] Randomness, Crafting, and Quests

Stratics Veteran

Lately I decided to finish up the tinkering skill on one of my characters. I'm at the point where you have to make Spyglasses to get GM. Since you can't salvage them (God knows why you can't salvage all metal items, but there it is), I decided to look up other avenues to gain. Low and behold, there's a Heartwood quest for it. Now I've never really committed to doing Heartwood quests for any serious endeavor, such as finding recipes and whatnot, so I figured why the heck not? Gain skill and maybe get an odd recipe or two. And since I'm trying to GM tinkering anyway, I'll eventually want those rare recipes for jewelry. It's a win/win!

The experience has been frustrating to a point.. Not enough to make me STOP doing it, but from that experience, I'd like to purpose the following suggestions:

1) Get rid of Random Quest offerings by NPCS. I'm just going to keep clicking "Refuse" until I get the quest I want anyway. We can bypass the randomness now, so why make it more annoying than it has to be? Make it so I can select from a list of quests offered by that NPC.

2) Why am I getting recipes for Tailoring from making Tinkering items? There is absolutely no need for this. I suppose some would say "Why not? It's something you can sell or maybe you have that skill as well." and they'd be right, but that's an exception and not the rule. I'm not out to make money, or work up other trades, I'm out to gain skill and get a specific recipe. If the reason for this is to increase the loot tables so that rare recipes stay rare due to randomness, well that leads me into...

3) Make it a steady progression to get the recipe I want. Make it like the Doom loot system where as you do quests of a specific type, your chances of getting one of the rare recipes for that trade increase. Or make it like a library system, with turn-ins for points that we can spend on a recipe (Or even runic tools since there are no BOD's). You could argue, "Scripters! Scripters!", but who cares? They'll get what they want in the end no matter what through attrition alone. And the more of these rare recipes are out there, the less they'll be motivated to script and sell it. I wouldn't care if the truly rare recipes took an OBSCENE number of points or iterations of a quest for a specific trade type, I just want to know I'm working TOWARDS something.

I'm all for random little knick-nacks like talismans or an odd weapon or piece of armor, but the fact that I have no guarantee that I'll end up with the recipe I want due to the insidious nature of the RNG is a bit off-putting to say the least.

Stratics Veteran

I had a lot of fun with the spring cleaning event - there was still all the "hope and excitement" of RNG combined with the slow steady tick of progress turning in the surplus talismans and recipes for points.

On the other hand, purely non-random rewards get very, very tedious. I'm starting to do some collection donations again but knowing that it's going to be months of grind until I get my target reward is not really fun.

Scripters (and powergamers) always matter - being a crafter should be as rewarding a gameplay experience as being a monster-hunter, but when the market gets flooded with high end loot, the nerf stick hits everyone no matter how much or how little they play. Heartwood quests are a perfect example of this - they've had to be nerfed into near-irrelevence to the average player.

Stratics Veteran

Agreed. I'd take a mix of Measurable Progress with Randomness any day.. Better than PURE randomness. And ugh, don't get me started on the thought of doing the collections. Some nice items that quite frankly, I dread beginning to work for.. Although I STILL prefer tedious over "Maybe you will, maybe you won't.". My first character was a lumberjack - I made my first 60k doing nothing but chopping trees and selling wooden shields. Tedious, I can handle.

And yes, scripting DOES matter, but to be against a system of measurable progress BECAUSE of scripters is an exercise in folly - No matter what the average player does, no matter what system the dev's implement (Barring a time-based system - Only so many quests per day/hour, which is in itself controversial and can still be worked around.. See BOD's) the scripters will win out simply because they cheat.

I agree! I also think they should add much more crafting quests so a person could work up any crafting skill to gm just by doing the crafting quests. They should add enough so there are not gaps in the skill gain area where you have to make useless items which will be only thrown away.

I like the rng/progression idea so that a person could end up getting a runic for their efforts. Right now, you could do the quests 24/7 and never ever see a decent runic or a rare recipe due to the rng.

Oh, btw, instead of clicking refuse, keep the npc's bar up and repeatedly click it and it will cycle thru the quests. (they still should have a drop down menu for quests offered, be nice to steer away from making everything tedious and carpal-tunnel inducing from so much repeated mouse clicking)

Stratics Veteran

Oh, btw, instead of clicking refuse, keep the npc's bar up and repeatedly click it and it will cycle thru the quests.

Click to expand...

..... I never even thought of that. I mean I always have the bar up, but I never thought to just right click it again rather than hit refuse... Excellent tip! Thanks for that.. Saves me a click.. X1000000000.

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